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When Machines Run Amok

The author was taken aback when he observed an AI program teach itself to play an arcade game—much better than its human designers. Frank Rose reviews ‘Life 3.0’ by Max Tegmark.

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Frank Rose

Aug. 28, 2017 6:58 p.m. ET

Cosmologists take on the big questions, and in “Life 3.0” Max Tegmark addresses what may be the biggest of them all: What happens when humans are no longer the smartest species on the planet—when intelligence is available to programmable objects that have no experience of mortal existence in a physical body? Science fiction poses such questions frequently, but Mr. Tegmark, a physicist at MIT, asks us to put our “Terminator” fantasies aside and ponder other, presumably more realistic, scenarios. Among them is the possibility that a computer program will become not just intelligent but wildly so—and that we humans will...